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> only knew Python (or it was the best they kne) One of the reasons for them knowing it in the first place was false marketing that python "reads like English"

> only knew Python (or it was the best they kne) One of the reasons for them knowing it in the first place was false marketing that python "reads like English" (as if that would be a good thing). The problems with these really smart people is that they hate not knowing everything... and lot of them a decade or two ago were never exposed to programming before they started doing research... so when they hear that it "reads like English", they feel that they can conquer it... eventually, being the smart people they are, they learn enough to get their jobs done... and some of them learn it quite well, while some others write terrible code that somehow works but they themselves don't quite understand why. But most of them would not take on another language unless someone comes up with a false claim that "it is easier than English" or some bs like that.

blunte 5y ago
At one of my previous companies we hired a really intelligent (generally) and very likeable data scientist who arrived and wrote the worst Python I've seen. Actually it wasn't the worst, because it was all inline copy/paste code rather than convoluted OOPish code. He could solve very complex problems, but his tooling was horrible. It wasn't his fault. He had solid education from a German STEM uni (with PhD.), but there was a serious lack of programming skill. It would seem that because Python is "so easy" to get started that people don't feel they have to bother with learning any real programming skills beyond solving their immediate problem. I don't blame this on the scientists; software is not their domain. The problem is with PHBs who don't know better and who make decisions based on the toolset used by the "special" people.
zozbot234 5y ago
> One of the reasons for them knowing it in the first place was false marketing that python "reads like English" (as if that would be a good thing). Sounds like the story of BASIC (and a bunch of other early languages besides - BASIC was originally a simplified variety of FORTRAN, with a REPL terminal-driven workflow tacked on as a key innovation), except that Python is a lot more semantically complex than BASIC, even at a novice level. Perhaps we might use some development tools that can make, e.g. Rust read "like English", too. (After all, the Rust compiler diagnostics literally read like nicely-phrased English, so extending the same approach to the rest of the language representation has some meaningful precedent.) Then novice scientists might learn to program by tweaking their code and reading what it actually means, pretty-printed in nice English language.

blunte 5y ago

At one of my previous companies we hired a really intelligent (generally) and very likeable data scientist who arrived and wrote the worst Python I've seen. Actually it wasn't the worst, because it was all inline copy/paste code rather than convoluted OOPish code. He could solve very complex problems, but his tooling was horrible. It wasn't his fault. He had solid education from a German STEM uni (with PhD.), but there was a serious lack of programming skill. It would seem that because Python is "so easy" to get started that people don't feel they have to bother with learning any real programming skills beyond solving their immediate problem. I don't blame this on the scientists; software is not their domain. The problem is with PHBs who don't know better and who make decisions based on the toolset used by the "special" people.

zozbot234 5y ago

> One of the reasons for them knowing it in the first place was false marketing that python "reads like English" (as if that would be a good thing). Sounds like the story of BASIC (and a bunch of other early languages besides - BASIC was originally a simplified variety of FORTRAN, with a REPL terminal-driven workflow tacked on as a key innovation), except that Python is a lot more semantically complex than BASIC, even at a novice level. Perhaps we might use some development tools that can make, e.g. Rust read "like English", too. (After all, the Rust compiler diagnostics literally read like nicely-phrased English, so extending the same approach to the rest of the language representation has some meaningful precedent.) Then novice scientists might learn to program by tweaking their code and reading what it actually means, pretty-printed in nice English language.